Hip-hop: a hard look at the baddest song in town

The morning paper featured a lifestyle article entitled, "Talkin' hip-hop." It focused on hip-hop week now being celebrated at a local college in Atlanta, and the issues some black college-age females have with the imagery rap music conveys. They quote them as saying, "We love hip-hop. Does hip-hop love us?"

Hip-hop and rap. The most popular music in black America - if one dare call it music. It's hypersexuality and hypermasculinity run amuck. It's macho, masochistic, profane and often violent verse, delivered in a cocky, confrontational cadence. The style is "in your face, ready for war." It defines the authority of the black man. It's become the mantra for male blackness.

While some view hip-hop as simply a message from the street, it's not. Rap has a racial identity. Among blacks, rap crosses class lines. It's a message from black man in America. It's their psychic armor. "We're tough. We talk tough and we act tough."

After work today, look around the parking garage and you'll see well-heeled young black executives and professionals getting into their BMW and Lexus automobiles and turning on the same trash you heard blasting from the boom box of that young thug you passed on the sidewalk.

If confronted, they'll probably say it's harmless ... just another American phenomenon ... another game of cowboys and Indians. Not so. Its aggressive masculinity attests to thuggery and the disposability of women. The gun, a favorite accessory of unsmiling, arm throwing rappers, is the classic phallic symbol. In my opinion, nothing anyone can say can justify its grim lyrics that make a joke of violence, promote cop killings, degrade women and make sex a wicked punishment.

I believe hip-hop music - especially what's called gangsta rap - is sounding a wake-up call from Hell to white America. But few want to hear it. If you've got the stomach for it, read the lyrics of Ice-T's infamous "Cop Killer:"

I got my black shirt on.
I got my black gloves on.
I got my ski mask on.
This shit's been too long.

I got my 12-gauge sawed-off.
I got my headlights turned off.
I'm ‘bout to bust some shots off.
I'm ‘bout to dust some cops off. . . .

I'm ‘bout to kill me somethin'
A pig stopped me for nuthin'!
Cop killer, better you than me.
Cop killer, fuck police brutality! . . .

Die, die, die pig, die!
Fuck the police! . . .
Fuck the police yeah!

Or Jay-Z's "Is That Yo Bitch?"

I don't love ‘em, I fuck ‘em.
I don't chase ‘em, I duck ‘em.
I replace ‘em with another one. . . .
She be all on my dick.

Of course, not all hip-hop and rap is vulgar and profane. But it's the nastiest rap that sells best, and the nastiest cuts that make a career.

Sadly, some parents and teachers don't seem to care what hip-hop conveys to the youth in their charge. In my home state, one of Savannah's mostly black high schools had the local rapper Camoflauge appear as a guest several times before his untimely murder. Here's an excerpt from one of his songs:

Gimme tha keys to tha car, I'm ready for war.
When we ride on these niggas smoke that ass like a ‘gar.
Hit your block with a Glock, clear the set with a Tech . . . .
You think I'm jokin, see if you laughing when tha pistol be smokin-
Leave you head split wide open
And you bones get broken. . . .

After learning of the incident, Dr. John H. McWhorter, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, had this to say: "More than a few of the Concerned Black People inviting this ‘artist' to speak to the impressionable youth of Savannah would presumably be the first to cry out about ‘how whites portray blacks in the media.'"

McWhorter, a noted black author and educator, earned his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and became Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley after teaching at Cornell University. His academic specialty is language change and language contact. He writes and comments extensively on race, ethnicity and cultural issues.

He's a black man who's critical of the modern black culture. In one of his columns, he made these comments: "At 2 AM on the New York subway not long ago, I saw a scene that captures the essence of rap's destructiveness. A young black man entered the car and began to rap loudly - profanely, arrogantly - with the usual wild gestures. This went on for five irritating minutes. When no one paid attention, he moved on to another car, all the while spouting his doggerel. This was what this young black man presented as his message to the world - his oratory, if you will.

"Anyone who sees such behavior as a path to a better future - anyone who insists that hip-hop is an urgent "critique of a society that produces the need for the thug persona"-should step back and ask himself just where, exactly, the civil rights-era blacks might have gone wrong in lacking a hip-hop revolution. They created the world of equality, striving, and success I live and thrive in. Hip-hop creates nothing."

Some would argue that hip-hop is just another musical genre. One that like rock ‘n' roll has the old folks all stirred up. Well, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis never had a shootout. And to the best of my knowledge, Pat Boone never toted a piece. I also don't recall any lines in "Young Love" suggestive of abusing the bitch.

The writer in the AJC said, "Get past the beat and the blings and the braggadocio, and you'll find that hip-hop is all about dialogue." That's true. It's tough talk. Vulgar talk. Homoeroticism and strip-club trash gone unchecked. Among young blacks, it validates drugs, street crime, predatory sex, drive-by shootings and wanton killings. The question I would ask is this: Which came first, the first black rapper or the first black ripper?

Sadly, many major corporations are beginning to use hip-hop and rap in their television advertising. Companies like Verizon and Daimler-Chrysler want the young, black market. Some of it is so bad - like the commercial "Gunned Down" rapper 50 Cent filmed for Reebok's in the UK- that industry watchdogs pulled it off the air.

There's no doubt more to come. There's nothing some folks won't do for money. If I can avoid buying products from those companies, I will. With all the distractions in the world today, no one should want to validate something that harms our young people, creates nothing and further pollutes our society.